Interesting and Difficult Words You Should Know I

The group of 30-40 words I discuss here and in the next two essays are useful, even if little-used words. The joy of discovering them, however, often is twofold: it resides in the words themselves and in their neighbors or synonyms. For every word from the following that I already knew is a word that I learned through the first word. Words open worlds, not only through knowing the word itself but through inviting you in to meet its neighbors.

A Fun Beginning

Let's begin with a fun word: quidnunc. It is a busybody, gossip or a nosy person. But the Latin standing behind it is hilarious--"quid" means "what" and "nunc" is "now." The quidnunc is a person who goes around all the time saying "what now?" You even get a picture in your mind of such a person--maybe you have a name for him/her. The word entered into English in 1709; here are a few classic uses: from 1874--"Some wretched intrigue which had puzzled two generations of quidnuncs." Or, from 1978: "The born gossipmonger, the quidnunc who would almost rather die than be the last to know.." Isn't your world richer?

Well, if it isn't by now, the story following my discovery of pavid will make it so. Just as quidnunc generates no other words in English, so pavid is a sort of single word. The classical Latin pavidus means fearful, and so a pavid person is fearful or timid. "Let's get rid of the pavid politics of the neo-liberals." Or, "sometimes it is better to venture all and be taken by surprise than to spend one's life in pavid apprehension of a danger than may never arise." Thackerey, in a Homer-type simile, wrote: "As eagles go forth and bring home to their eaglets the lamb or the pavid kid, I say there are men who...victual their nests by plunder." Ah victual as a verb--you can search that one out yourself. Dictionaries sometimes list pavidity or pavidly, but usually pavid is all you get...

As I was minding my business trying to understand pavid, my eye fell on pavior, a near-neighbor. Some people may lust after their neighbor's goods in real life, but the only thing about a neighbor that I desire is the meaning of a neighboring word to the one I am studying. But, the word pavior, also paver, is trivially simple. It means a "person who lays paving." But when I dug deeper, I discovered that the first company of paviors, so to speak, was the "Worshipful Company of Paviors," a livery company in London whose duty it was to care for streets and whose records go back to the 13th century. Worshipful here has nothing to do with whether they sing "Holy, Holy, Holy" on Sunday mornings; worshipful means "noble" or "reputable" or "distinguished." Wyclif's late 14th century translation of the Bible had Jacob speak about the Bethel, the place where he dreamed and saw a ladder reaching to heaven, as follows: "How worschipful [L. terribilis] is this place..." (Gen. 28:17). Back now to the Paviors of London. They have a website, which tells us, among other things, that the company is 56th in order of precedence of the City Livery Companies (who wouldn't give his eye teeth to memorize that list?). What did paviors do at first, that is, before macadam was invented? Here is an excerpt:

"Records of the Paviors date back to 1280, when Paviors were first made responsible for the repair and cleaning of London's streets and pavements. The trade included 'gong ferming', the emptying and cleansing of privies, a profitable business carried out in appalling conditions."

So, at first, they went "gong ferming." If you say that to a person today, s/he will look at you nonplussed, but it wasn't always so. Ferming is the present participle of the verb to farm, the original meaning of which was "to cleanse, empty, purge." A gong has nothing to do with the 70s TV show; a gong used to be either a privy or the "contents of a privy; ordure." So, if a mother said to her kids, "Where are you going today?" and they said, "We a goin' gong ferming," you know you have a problem on your hands.

Near Neighbors

While we are on gong, let's turn to gig and a few neighboring words taught me some new things. Actually, I backed into the word gig through the word futilitarian. The word futilitarian was introduced in the 1820s as a humorous term to describe the turgid prose of the utilitarians. It actually was quite funny--"I might become a utilitarian if I could understand their futilitarian writings." The reason that utilitarians were open to this criticism is that the "godfather" of the movement, Jeremy Bentham was constantly introducing new terms and writing in crabbed, overly sententious (i.e., pompous) and voluminous prose. He died about five years after the word futilitarian was introduced to describe a person devoted to futile pursuits.

But how do we get from futilitarian/utilitarian to gig? Easy. Via an 1873 quotation: "The word international, introduced by the immortal Bentham, and Mr. Carlyle's gigmanity..are significantly characteristic of the utilitarian philanthropist and of the futilitarian misanthropist, respectively." While I can't say anything about who was a philanthropist and who a misanthropist, I can tell you a little about "gigmanity." Gigman was introduced by Thomas Carlyle in 1830, but was based on a passage from a trial transcript of 1823. In that trial (Thurtell's trial), the transcript runs: "He always maintained an appearance of respectability, and kept his horse and gig." A gig is nothing other than a "light two-wheeled one-horse carriage." Thus, a "horse and gig" were the badges of middle-class respectability. A gigman was one who kept or used a gig. Carlyle used it for one whose respectability was measured by his keeping a gig. Figuratively speaking, then, it could describe someone who was a sort of narrow-minded "philistine," who wanted above all to appear "respectable" to neighbors. Gigmanity, therefore, is an imitative nonce-word whose meaning should be crystalline. "The quest for gigmanity"--is still all around us. Too bad that the word has seemingly fallen out of use; we have so many people to whom it fittingly applies.

Now, let's get serious, in the next essay.

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